The Eyes Have It: How Butterflies Navigate to Suitable Habitat
Do butterflies find suitable habitat through vision or via other senses? The results of a new study were easy to see: Butterflies with flash-induced blindness consistently failed to navigate to target habitat that unaffected butterflies could readily find.
A Little Bit of Spit and a Whole Lot of Patience: What It Takes to Produce a Butterfly Field Guide
Sebastián Mena of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama collected and photographed 120 butterfly species for a guidebook he co-authored about Panama’s Pipeline Road Trail. Find out what Mena says goes into researching, writing, and designing an insect field guide.
Butterfly Pupae Make Sounds In Never-Before-Known Ways
New research explores how pupae of certain butterfly species make a "twittering" noise—via a wiggling movement that triggers sound from tiny structures in the membranes between their abdominal segments.
Do Managed Burns in Grasslands Benefit Butterflies?
Though under-used, prescribed fire can reinstate natural disturbance regimes in the North American Great Plains. The Range Science program at North Dakota State University is studying how this practice affects the local ecosystem, including its impact on pollinators such as butterflies.
How Butterflies Pattern Top and Bottom Wing Surfaces Differently
Researchers at the National University of Singapore have identified the gene transcription factors in butterflies that give rise to their different color patterns on the top and bottom sides of their wings.
Butterfly Color Patterns Reveal Clues About Genes That Build Insect Wings
New research identifies the genetic code by which butterflies assign color patterns to different parts of their wings
Endangered Maritime Ringlet Shows Continued Decline in Eastern Canada
An endangered butterfly species in eastern Canada appears to be declining in numbers, but a better understanding of how environmental conditions affect its lifecycle may better inform conservation efforts, according […]
Walking With the Butterflies in Taiwan’s Maolin Valley
By Laura Kraft This post is the seventh in the “Travel Bug” series by Laura Kraft, a recent graduate from the University of Georgia, who is chronicling her travels in […]
The Eyes of Common Bluebottle Butterflies Have 15 Photoreceptor Classes
When researchers studied the eyes of common bluebottle butterflies (Graphium sarpedon), they found at least 15 different classes of “photoreceptors” — light-detecting cells comparable to the rods and cones in […]
The Butterfly Changes its Spots — Eyespots, that is
Eyespots are one of nature’s favorite forms of misdirection, shared by fish, frogs, birds, and many insects. Aside from deflecting attack, they can also be used as a “startle” mechanism, […]
Some Moths are Actually Butterflies According to DNA Sequencing Study
By tracing nearly 3,000 genes to the earliest common ancestor of butterflies and moths, University of Florida scientists have created an extensive “Tree of Lepidoptera” in the first study to […]
Bacterial Diversity in Butterflies Changes Drastically During Metamorphosis
For the first time ever, a team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has sequenced the internal bacterial makeup of the three major life stages of a butterfly species, […]